Vivian Browne
Little Men #69, c. 1966

Oil on paper

Unframed: 23 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches (60.3 x 45.1 cm)

Framed: 31 1/8 x 25 1/8 inches (79.1 x 63.8 cm)

© Vivian Browne, Courtesy of RYAN LEE Gallery, New York and Adobe Krow Archives, Los Angeles 

Selected by Julia Trotta

Vivian Browne (1929 Laurel, FL – 1993 New York, NY) was known for her culturally-critical portraits and abstract paintings inspired by her travels and socio-political observations. Mindful of her particular experience as an artist, she probed the intersection of misogyny and racism throughout her life and practice. “Black art is political,” Browne said in 1985 to Black American Literature Forum. “If it’s not political, it’s not black art.”

Browne was driven by content over form, and over three decades her work spanned many interests and impulses. She often depicted her friends and contemporaries, including large-scale portraits of Camille Billops and Norman Lewis, but she was particularly compelled by the realistic and even unflattering aspects of humanity. Her first major body of work from the late 1960s, Little Men, incarnates male anger and frustration. Across over 100 paintings and drawings, middle-aged white men—naked or in business suits—suck their thumbs and wave their arms with grotesquely contorted expressions on their faces in a satirical portrait of infantilized white men in positions of power.

Born in Florida and primarily raised in New York, Browne received both a BS and BFA from Hunter College in 1950 and 1959, respectively. She attended the Art Students League for a short time, and in 1972 she studied at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. From 1971 through 1992, Browne taught at Rutgers University in Newark. She headed the art and design department from 1975 to 1978, and in 1985 she became a professor of contemporary black and Hispanic art, painting and other fine arts courses.

In 2025, Browne’s first museum retrospective opened at the Contemporary Arts Center, OH and traveled to the Phillips Collection, DC. In 2022, her work was included in the landmark group exhibition Just Above Midtown, 1974 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, a retrospective of the historic Just Above Midtown gallery. Browne was also featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s Art as Verb, a 2-year exhibition which highlighted experimental works from the museum’s collection. In 2018, her work was included in Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971 at Hunter College. The show revisited the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition's historic 1971 exhibition that responded to the Whitney Museum’s refusal to appoint a Black curator for their survey Contemporary Black Artists in America.

Browne’s work is held in numerous public collections including the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives at Emory University, GA; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Detroit Institute of Art, MI; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland; John Cotton Dana Library at Rutgers University, NJ; Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, AL; The Library of Congress, DC; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Petrucci Family Foundation: Collection of African-American Art, NJ; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; Special Collections and Archives, University of California, CA; Wadsworth Atheneum, CT; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.